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The French Geodesic Mission to the Equator (French: Expédition géodésique française en Équateur), also called the French Geodesic Mission to Peru and the Spanish-French Geodesic Mission, was an 18th-century expedition to what is now Ecuador carried out for the purpose of performing an arc measurement, measuring the length of a degree of latitude near the Equator, by which the Earth's ...
The Guiana Space Centre (French: Centre spatial guyanais; CSG), also called Europe's Spaceport, [3] [4] is a spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana, an overseas region of France in South America. Kourou is located approximately 500 kilometres (310 mi; 270 nmi) north of the equator at a latitude of 5°.
French Guiana is situated on the northeast coast of South America between 2° and 5° latitude north and covers an area of 35,135 square miles. It is separated from Surinam (Dutch Guiana) by the Maroni River and two of its tributaries, the Aoua and Itany, in the west, and from Brazil by the Tumuc Humac Mountains in the south and the Oyapock ...
French Guiana [a] is an overseas department and region of France located on the northern coast of South America in the Guianas and the West Indies.Bordered by Suriname to the west and Brazil to the east and south, French Guiana covers a total area of 84,000 km 2 (32,000 sq mi) [2] [3] [7] and a land area of 83,534 km 2 (32,253 sq mi). [3]
Political map of The Guianas. The Guianas, also spelled Guyanas or Guayanas, is a geographical region in north-eastern South America. Strictly, the term refers to the three Guianas: Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, formerly British, Dutch, and French Guiana respectively. Broadly, it refers to the South American coast from the mouth of the ...
Because of a planet's rotation around its own axis, the gravitational acceleration is less at the equator than at the poles. In the 17th century, following the invention of the pendulum clock, French scientists found that clocks sent to French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, ran slower than their exact counterparts in Paris ...
The ellipsoid is defined by the equatorial axis (a) and the polar axis (b); their radial difference is slightly more than 21 km, or 0.335% of a (which is not quite 6,400 km). Many methods exist for determination of the axes of an Earth ellipsoid, ranging from meridian arcs up to modern satellite geodesy or the analysis and interconnection of ...
Atlases largely stopped using the Mercator projection for world maps or for areas distant from the equator in the 1940s, preferring other cylindrical projections, or forms of equal-area projection. The Mercator projection is, however, still commonly used for areas near the equator where distortion is minimal.